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Legendary Landscapes: Coloring Book Journey – A Review

Legendary Landscapes is published by Colorworth Publishing and was very kindly sent to me by Witek, one of the illustrators. This book is HUGE at 30cm square, it’s paperback with a sturdy but bendy card cover and it’s a really weighty book containing 96 pages, including 85 double-sided images. The paper is bright white with a little tooth and the spine is glue-bound meaning a little of each image is lost in to the spine because they are borderless. The paper is medium thickness and didn’t bleed with water-based pens but did shadow a little so be careful and always test in an inconspicuous area, pencils were really easy to use in this book and I was able to get lots of layers and blend really well so it was a pleasure to colour for my review. The book contains a mixture of single-page and double-page spreads and the images are illustrated by seven different artists so they contain a range of styles but these are all very complementary with each other so there is great cohesion within the book. A huge variety of landscapes are illustrated in this book from lakes to canyons, sunsets to forests, graffiti-covered streets to temples, abstract worlds to unexplored planets, underwater to outer space and so much more! Everything you can think of is covered in this book and the variety is astounding! Small versions of each image are shown at the back of the book along with the name of that piece and which artist illustrated it, there are also biographies of each artist so that you can find out more about each one and look up more of their work if you wish.

In terms of mental health, this books is fantastic because it’s so natural and I find images of nature the most calming to colour. The scenery is beautifully illustrated and really draws you in and takes you to another place which is ideal for those of us who are housebound and long to be able to take walks in the forest, swim in lakes, or trek up mountains. This book offers hours and hours of escapism and distraction and is sure to calm you down and help you zone out of life’s stresses and worries and restore your inner peace. The line thickness varies throughout from spindly thin to medium and the line thickness varies throughout the book and each image with some having a range of line thicknesses to show different details. Because the images are illustrated by a number of artists, there is quite a variance in style though they feel very cohesive despite this. The intricacy and detail levels vary a huge amount throughout the book from pictures with large, open spaces where you can really hone your blending and shading skills with your pencils, to images with lots of small, intricate details that you can break out your fineliners or super sharp pencils to get into all of the nooks and crannies. These images are huge so you will need fairly good concentration but they take days rather than hours to colour so you can easily split it into smaller chunks if you’re having a bad day and colour just one mushroom, hot air balloon, or mountain and go back to it later or another day, when you’re feeling a bit better. The natural imagery lends itself really well to helping reduce symptoms of mental illness and it’s sure to calm you down, keep you distracted and focused, and would be absolutely ideal for practising mindfulness whilst colouring because it’s so easy to zone out and get lost into the world you’re colouring.

I would highly recommend this book to those of you who like colouring natural things and landscapes. This is a beautiful book, brilliantly executed and while it’s quite expensive to get in the UK because the producers are Canadian, it’s really worth the extra cost because this will truly give you months of colouring fun and is sure to improve your colouring and blending skills whilst helping your mental health. If you’re wanting to start practising mindfulness then this is the book for you, it’s perfect for focusing on your breathing and staying in the here and now within the beautiful landscape you’re colouring.

If you’d like to purchase a copy of the book it’s not available on Amazon in the UK but it can be found here:

You can follow the Facebook page of the book here. You can also join their group to see other people’s versions of the pages which make great inspiration, or to show off your own colouring – here. The illustrators are now working on a second book in the series and they need your help in funding their Kickstarter project to get this book created. More information can be found here.